Poll: Voters Prefer Cuomo’s Pre-K Plan Over de Blasio’s

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio waves as he arrives to give the State of the City address at La Guardia Community College on Monday.

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ALBANY–About half of New York City voters prefer Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to pay for universal prekindergarten without a tax increase over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to raise funding from the wealthy, according to a Quinnipiac University poll set for release Wednesday.

Among city voters, 49% said they support the governor’s proposal to use existing state revenue to expand educational programs, while 40% said they backed the mayor’s proposal to pay for city pre-K with a tax increase on income above $500,000, the poll found.

Among voters statewide, 47% said they preferred Mr. Cuomo’s pre-K proposal, while 37% said they backed Mr. de Blasio’s.

Those results appear at odds with one of the central arguments that Mr. de Blasio has used to make the case for his plan–that he has the support of the public, both in the city and statewide, to raise taxes on the wealthy. In his state of the city address Monday, for example, the mayor suggested there is a “vast societal consensus” for his proposed tax increase.

A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, Marti Adams, said that “today’s poll shows that New Yorkers from across the political spectrum want universal pre-K and a real plan to provide it.”

The mayor and his supporters have criticized the governor’s plan as dependent on an unreliable source of funding.

Overall, 76% of voters statewide said they generally support paying for universal pre-K with state government funding, while 20% oppose that practice.

About 51% of city voters, meanwhile, said they have a favorable impression of Mr. de Blasio after his first month in office, while 22% said it was unfavorable.

The poll, conducted Feb. 6-10, surveyed 1,488 New York state registered voters, with a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

The margin of error for the New York City voter subset was 4.7 percentage points, according to a spokeswoman.